Motor faults, especially mechanical faults, reflect eminently faint characteristic amplitudes in the stator current. In order to solve the issue of the motor current lacking effective and direct signal representation, this paper introduces a visual fault detection method for an induction motor based on zero-sequence current and an improved symmetric dot matrix pattern. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is used to eliminate the power frequency in the zero-sequence current derived from the original signal. A local symmetrized dot pattern (LSDP) method is proposed to solve the adaptive problem of classical symmetric lattice patterns with outliers. The LSDP approach maps the zero-sequence current to the ultimate coordinate and obtains a more intuitive two-dimensional image representation than the time-frequency image. Kernel density estimation (KDE) is used to complete the information about the density distribution of the image further to enhance the visual difference between the normal and fault samples. This method mines fault features in the current signals, which avoids the need to deploy additional sensors to collect vibration signals. The test results show that the fault detection accuracy of the LSDP can reach 96.85%, indicating that two-dimensional image representation can be effectively applied to current-based motor fault detection.
Keywords: fault detection; induction motors; kernel density estimation; local symmetrized dot pattern; zero-sequence current.